


Dark Is The Night

by DreamsOfSleep



Series: Pepperwood AU [6]
Category: New Girl
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Exes, F/M, Pepperwood AU, Personal Demons, Post-Divorce, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-15 09:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 10,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7216582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamsOfSleep/pseuds/DreamsOfSleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Zombie Wars took Julius Pepperwood's soul. He was a shell of a human being trying to return to the land of the living. His personal demons cause him to lose the love of his life Jessica Night. This is the story of Julius Pepperwood in the After - how he faced down his personal demons and became human again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lost Souls

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Pepperwood - The Grimwold Case](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/207298) by RayKay72. 



> This is a fic about a man facing down his personal demons.
> 
> **Trigger Warnings for PTSD, alcoholism, and domestic violence.**
> 
> Double meaning of the title:
> 
>   * Pepperwood's personal demons isolate him from other people so his life is "dark" until he conquers them and makes it back into the "light."
>   * Julius loses the love of his life Jessica Night so she is "dark" to him because she isn't in his life anymore. The light has gone out of his life.
> 


If he knew he wasn’t coming back from the Zombie Wars he would have told her to leave him right there on the terminal strip the day they sent him away from her. She would have cried and begged him to take it back, and it would have felt like someone was ripping out his heart, but at least she would have always known he loved her, that he had never stopped not even for a second. She wouldn’t have stuck around so he could break her heart in the After. 

\---

It was an all-hands on deck situation. The federal and local governments could not locate or control the flow of the serum turning the poor and destitute in small towns across America into flesh-eating monsters so they recruited the help of private investigation firms.

It seemed like someone’s sick idea of a joke. Someone was using the vulnerable to create an undead army of inhumanely strong cannibals by dumping a potent serum in the drinking water of the local reservoirs and into the fields to poison the food they grew.

The agents could only prevent others from turning; there was no cure for the already undead. Their orders were to shoot to kill by destroying the brain, but that meant shooting creatures that still looked like men, women, and children. Some agents hesitated when they looked into the creatures’ faces and got their throats ripped out. Everyone learned to swallow their feelings and do their jobs.

\---

They never did find out who was responsible for the serum production, but they halted the spread of the undead. They quarantined the affected areas, destroying every last known zombie. Monsters that still wore the faces of humans.


	2. The Man With My Face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He can't feel anything anymore.

When Julius returned from the Zombie Wars, he might as well have been a zombie himself. He was an empty shell of a person, haunted by all the people he had seen taken from this Earth, all the people turning into monsters and losing their humanity. 

When Jessica had seen him get off the plane, she had run to him and he had wrapped his arms around her clutching her, crushing her to him. She had cried her happy tears into his shoulder after not seeing or hearing from him for months. He had felt nothing, but he had desperately wanted to.

 _Where was the love for her he had felt before?_ He kept waiting for it to come back but he felt numb. He had wished for her for so long while he was away fighting zombies in Podunk towns. She _looked_ like his Jess, his wife, the love of his life, but she felt like a stranger to him.

\---

Those early days when he had first come home, he could feel the love for him radiating off of her. He had been short and snappish with her when he had really meant to say, “ _Stop._ Stop loving me. I don’t deserve you. I’m broken.”

She had taken it all in good stride. _He’s just adjusting to being back home. The war was too hard on him._ She kept waiting for him to talk to her, to look at her the way he used to, but he kept turning away from her. 

\---

He used to sleep with his whole body wrapped around her, spooning her to him and shielding her from the world. Now he sleeps with his back to her, turned away from her. 

It’s her that reaches out for him now. Trying to surround him with her whole self and bring him back into the world of the living. 

\---

Sometimes he doesn’t go to bed. He just sees terrible images every time he closes his eyes, reliving every single day he spent away from her, every single life he took. 

When that happens, he just paces their living room, waiting out the night. Those are the nights where she rests her hand on his pillow on his side of the bed and wishes for him to come back to her.

\---

He stops touching her and it hurts her. He used to touch her all the time; he couldn’t help himself. He needed her to know he loved her, showing her all the time with his hands, with his body. She tries to touch him but he flinches from her. It hurts her. 

\---

One day he goes to work, but he doesn’t come home. She frantically calls everyone she knows until they find him at some downtown bar, shitfaced. 

Schmidt and Winston bring him home, still half-drunk. She puts him to bed to let him sleep it off, but he won’t let her leave. He keeps reaching out to her, clutching her arm and calling her _honey,_ sobbing and apologizing to her over and over again and she sees the man she loved struggling to get out behind his eyes. 

He spoons her to him that night like he used to and she thinks things are going to turn around for the better, but the next night when he is stone-cold sober he turns away from her again, folding in upon himself. 

\---

It starts to happen more and more frequently. 

When he comes home drunk now, it’s never like the first time. He never reaches out for her again. Now he tells her not to touch him. He says to her, “Don’t come near me, honey…I’m dangerous; I’ll hurt you,” in a hard voice she has never heard him use on her before, his dark eyes piercing into hers, gripping her wrists painfully tight to keep her away from him as tears spill down her face.

She touches his face with her hand when his grip slackens on her wrists and he blacks out into slumber, freeing herself so that she can love him with her gentle hands.

\---

Sometimes he doesn’t come home and she doesn’t go looking for him. 

\---

She looks across the room at him and sees a stranger, not the man she fell in love with. She no longer sees the love for her in his eyes. He looks at her and she sees nothing, not even the slightest glimmer of affection for her at all. His eyes are flat and empty. He doesn’t love her anymore and he won’t let her help him and she can’t keep watching him destroy himself. 

She can’t do this anymore. 

\---

One day he comes home from work and he finds all her stuff is gone. He just sits on the edge of their bed and looks into their half-empty closet. He wants to call her and tell her everything, beg her to come home, but the words get stuck in his throat. He thinks she is better off without him. She is perfect in his memories but he can no longer feel what he felt for her then. It’s like he’s trying to swim to her underwater and he keeps running out of air before he gets to her. He tries to hold onto the fact that he loved her once, even if he can no longer feel it. It’s always just somewhere out of reach. 


	3. You've Been Served

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was the worst day of Julius Pepperwood's life.

The worst day of his life, even worse than being in the Zombie Wars, was sitting in the lawyer’s office across from her at a table and signing those divorce papers while she wiped her eyes, crying over him.

He wanted to reach across the table and take her hands in his, but he had lost the privilege. 

She slid their apartment key across the table to him. He slid it back over to her. 

“Keep it for emergencies,” he said. _If you ever decide to come home again. If you ever decide to let me back into your life._

She put it away in her purse, but didn’t return the gesture with a key to the new place she now lived in without him.

“The only thing I really want, Julius, is the green bracelet,” she said to him.

He took out his wallet and took the folded paper bracelet out of it. He pauses for a beat holding the flimsy paper bracelet in his fingers, the memories flooding back from their honeymoon. _Making love to her on a sandy Mexican beach. Chasing her into the ocean. Her in her red polka dot bikini, the prettiest girl on the whole beach, eyes filled with love for him._ The memories are still there but the emotions are all washed out. He remembers the idea of happiness but he still can’t feel it. 

He slides it across the table to her. 

She’s crying her eyes out looking at it and he still can’t feel a damn thing. 

They leave the divorce lawyer’s office. She’s walking ahead of him. They exit the building through the glass doors to the parking lot. Right before she gets into her car, he says, “I’m sorry, Jess,” in a flat voice to her back. She never turns to look at him. She gets into her car and drives out of his life. 

\---

He went home afterwards and sat down on what used to be her half of the bed in an apartment half empty of her stuff and missed her. 

He still felt numb so he didn’t feel sad exactly but it was like his life felt even emptier now without her there. 

He couldn’t stay in that apartment another second longer without her. 

He grabbed his keys and drove downtown.


	4. Circling The Drain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julius goes on a bender.

Julius goes on a month long bender just going from dive bar to dive bar and sleeping it off in the gutter.

He’s only taken one sick day (under protest) the entire time he has worked for the PI firm. 

After he doesn’t show up for work for four weeks, Schmidt comes after him and brings him back to his apartment. He lives with Schmidt for a while, dripping clean, shaking out all the alcohol. He keeps seeing all the ghosts of the people he murdered when he closes his eyes. He thinks he keeps saying her name over and over again and wishing he were dead, telling Schmidt to shoot him in the head. 

\---

When he is semi-coherent again, Schmidt brings him back into the big bosses’ offices at work to face the music. Mike wants to fire him and yells at him for being an incompetent drunk but Big Bob looks at him sympathetically with worried eyes. Big Bob is a silent partner for the firm and usually never gets involved in the business so when he speaks, everyone listens. Mike backs down. 

Big Bob tells Mike and Schmidt to leave the room and then sits down in a chair directly across from him. 

“Julius, I think you should go get some professional help. Take as much time as you need for it; your job will still be here waiting for you when you come back. You were one of our best agents and I hate seeing what’s happening to you. I’ve seen what happens to our best guys who come back and can’t shake what they’ve seen. I don’t want to lose you too. I would have kept you here if I knew you would come back like this.”

“It was my job,” Julius responds automatically. “I couldn’t have stayed behind being a paper pusher while all the other agents were fighting in the field.” 

Big Bob gives him a look. “It’s just a job, Julius. You have to be able to take off the badge at the end of the day so you can live the rest of your life.” 

If Julius was feeling more like his old self he would have cursed Big Bob out for sending him to what he referred to in his mind as ‘getting his head shrunk by voodoo doctors,’ but he was at the end of his rope. He had nothing left to give. He didn’t have her and he couldn’t focus and do the job that used to be his whole life before he met her, before he let her into his life. 

“Okay,” he says quietly, looking down at his feet. “I’ll go.” 


	5. Coming Clean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julius gets help and goes into recovery.

They check Julius into a place with white walls and pastel furniture. The building is populated with other agents who have also lived through the Zombie Wars and have had trouble returning to the world of the living. 

The doctors speak to him in soft voices. They make him talk about what he saw during the war, all the horrible images that he kept safely locked away in his head so that they wouldn’t hurt anyone else but him. _All those things he did. All those people he murdered. Everything he didn't do. All those people he couldn't save. The blood on his hands. The weight of those lives on his soul._ They keep telling him it’s not his fault over and over again, even though he knows it's a lie. 

One day it finally makes it in.

_I can't change what I did or didn't do. But I'm still alive. The world is still here and there are still good and beautiful and decent things in it. It survived in spite of everything and all those things still exist in me too. The version of me, the man I was before, still exists._

He starts sobbing and he finally feels something for the first time in over a year.

His brain slowly starts to attach his emotions back to his memories, back to his life. He remembers what it feels like to love her. He feels the daggers in his chest from losing her, but it is a good hurt because that means he remembers how important she is. She is the center of his universe. He would do anything for her, to protect her from harm, to keep her safe, to make her happy. Even if she doesn’t love him anymore and he has to love her from afar.

\---

He goes back to work at the PI firm. He finds out that Jess took a secretarial job at a different PI firm across town so that they wouldn’t have to see each other every day, or at all. Mike hired a new temp named Ryan to be their receptionist. Mike says that since Ryan is British, he ‘classes up the joint,’ but it’s not the same without her. A few weeks after Julius returns from the rehab facility, he goes to visit her at her new job after work. 

\---

When Jess sees him in the parking lot leaning against her car as she is leaving work, she backs up behind the glass doors of her office building like a frightened deer. She asks security to escort her out. 

“I just want to talk, Jess,” he says to her. 

When she gets closer to him, she notices his eyes are clear and not fuzzy and unfocused like the last time she saw him. She gestures for security to leave them.

“How’ve you been?” he asks her gently.

“Not good, Julius,” she says flatly.

Her cold tone hurts him. He shows her his one-month chip. 

“I got help, Jess. I’m better now.”

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore, Julius.” 

He flinches at that. “Don’t say that, Jess.” 

“It’s too hard for me, Julius.” 

She starts to walk away from him, but he grabs her wrist. He presses his one-month chip into the flat of her palm and uses his hand to close her fingers over it.

“Please, Jess?” he asks her with pleading eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I did to you, to us. But I still need you in my life. I’m not asking you to love me again. I’m just begging you for a second chance to keep you in my life.” 

He can see the beginnings of forgiveness in her eyes. She comes close to him and hugs him to her tightly. He wraps his arms around her, cradling her to him.

“I’m glad you got out of the Dark Place, Julius,” she whispers against his neck. 

“Me too,” he whispers back to her. 

\---

He knows he can never make it up to her, can’t win her back that easily, but he wants to stay in her life. He wants her to be happy, wants to give her the entire world if he can, even if she never loves him back again. 


	6. Second Chances

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julius Pepperwood and Jessica Night rekindle a fragile friendship.

After a few months, Big Bob convinces Jess to come back to work at their PI firm. He had always liked her, liked having her around. He dug her relentless optimism and sunny personality. He said that she kept the agents from getting too much into their own heads, as they all had a tendency to do when they were working on tough cases. She always made sure they actually hung up their badges and went home at the end of the day. He said that she helped reduce agent burnout. 

Julius got to see her every day again. 

She was still guarded against him and she didn’t talk to him like she used to, but slowly they rebuilt a fragile friendship. 

\---

She started leaving him jokes on post-it notes on his desk like she used to.

He started bringing her a cup of coffee when he passed her desk in the morning on his way in. _Two creams, two sugars, a touch of cinnamon._

She left him half-finished Rubik's cubes on his desk again because she knew they always distracted him when he got too stressed out on a case.

They didn't get lunch together anymore, but he always saved her the last chocolate donut with sprinkles in the breakroom on Fridays because he knew they were her favorite.

He liked being able to look up from his desk and see her there. 

\---

She started dating again. She eventually married a doctor named Sam. He was good on paper. Tall, dark, and handsome. A respected pediatrician. Well-connected. Someone she deserved. Jess and Sam made a hell of a lot more sense than she and Julius ever did. They made the perfect couple. 

Julius had screwed up and lost his chance with her, but he still liked having her in his life. He was glad that she had someone to take care of her.

He still loved her from afar.

\---

Sometimes she meets him for coffee at a local diner when he is working late and it feels like before they had started dating. She still worries about him…worries about whether he is sleeping enough, if he is eating alright. He asks about Sam to be polite, even though he doesn’t really want to know. She doesn’t ask him about who he’s seeing. 

\---

He had tried dating mainly to get Schmidt off his back about “moving on” and “having a good support system for his recovery,” but they had all been disastrous.

There was Caroline, the socialite, who said that he needed to quit being a PI and get a better job if he wanted a relationship with her after they had only gone out on two dates. 

There was Julia, the no-nonsense lawyer, who said that he needed to stop being so touchy-feely when he tried to hold her hand once and told him that he should schedule all of their dates through her secretary.

There was Nadia, the model, who almost got him shanked by Russian mobsters when he was driving through a bad part of town because she _had_ to visit that club. They let him go after they found out he was friends with Winston down at the precinct, who they played poker with and were oddly fond of.

There was Kai who said that he worked too much and kept trying to get him to go to water massage with her to de-stress _(not in this lifetime)_. 

There was Reagan, the pharmaceutical rep, who kept trying to mickey his drink with “happy pills” after she learned that he got out of rehab. 

The last straw was Angie, an exotic dancer, who he took to a weekend cabin retreat in the mountains. She ended up stealing his clothes and all his money and leaving him stranded out there. He was forced to call Schmidt to take the 5-hour drive to come pick him up. 

\---

He knew no other woman could fill the hole that Jess left behind in his life. 

He preferred to slide back into the old life that he had before he met her. _Work, sleep, work, sleep…wash, rinse, repeat._ Back to being married to the job, with the exception of always making time for his late night coffees with Jess. 


	7. Black and Blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Jess have a fight and Julius intervenes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *****Trigger warning for domestic violence*****

One day Jess has a fight with Sam at work right before closing time. 

They are having a screaming match in the lobby getting right up in each other’s faces.

Everyone averts their eyes the way you do when you see something intensely personal happen in public, not wanting to get involved.

Julius grinds his teeth and furtively watches them from a balcony on the second floor, trying to stay out of it, until he sees Sam hit her. Sam slaps her open-handed across the face with the flat of his palm, hard. It fills Julius with a white-hot rage, burning him down to his core. He bolts down the stairs and gets in between them, shoving Sam back and pulling Jess behind him. 

“Don’t you fucking touch her, Sam,” he snarls, his voice full of menace. 

“Stay out of it Julius; she’s my wife now, not yours,” Sam retorts.

They are standing toe to toe, glaring at each other and breathing hard, both clenching their fists. Security rushes out and drags Sam away, out through the front glass doors of the building. 

Julius turns back to Jess. She is holding her cheek where Sam slapped her. 

He touches her shoulder and looks intently into her eyes. “Are you okay, Jess?” he asks her with concern. 

“I’m okay, Julius. You didn’t have to get involved. I can take care of myself.” He can see the adrenaline still pumping through her. She looks at him defiantly before the fight goes out of her. Her shoulders slump and she looks away from him.

“Come on,” he says. He wraps his hand around her wrist and leads her into an empty breakroom.

He makes her sit down at one of the tables. He tilts her chin up to examine the side of her bruised face starting to turn mottled shades of purple and blue. _Her beautiful face._

He grabs an ice pack from the breakroom fridge and sits down next to her, gently holding the ice pack to her cheek.

Julius gets a bit of déjà vu taking care of her in this way. It reminds him of all the times he took care of her when they were still married. He looks in her eyes and thinks she is remembering too.

“You need help getting away from him, Jess?” he asks her quietly.

She shakes her head. Her jaw is tense. He knows that she is as stubborn as he is when she wants to be.

He gives her a look. “I don’t think you should go home, Jess. Not when he’s like that. Do you want to stay at my place tonight? I’ll sleep on the couch.”

She looks off into the middle distance. “I have to get home so I can plan that doctors' social for next week.”

He looks at her in disbelief. “Let him do it himself. You’re his wife, not his party planner. Don’t go home, Jess. I don’t want to read about you in a homicide report in the newspaper tomorrow morning." 

She rolls her eyes at him. “You’re being melodramatic, Julius. We got in a fight. Remember the epic fights we used to have?” 

He flashes back to when they used to fight. _They would scream at each other in their apartments, giving each other as good as they got, but they were always professional at work. They usually just gave each other the silent treatment until one of them broke. Either he would go down to the corner deli and get her that special chocolate pudding he knew she liked or she would squeeze his hand as she passed his desk and it would be over just like that._

_Their worst fight was when she had asked him about getting a key to his place. He had freaked out, feeling her invading all of his private spaces, all the hidden parts of himself he never wanted anybody to see, taking his independence away from him. They didn’t speak to each other for a whole month because they can both hold a goddamn grudge when they feel like it. Schmidt had slapped the back of his head one day and told him to get it together because he had been an even more miserable SOB than usual that past month and he was making everyone else in the office go through a living hell right along with him. He had left a copy of his apartment key on her desk when she was at lunch and it was over again just like that._

_He didn’t know what he had been so afraid of. As always, she knew him best; he had loved being able to come home to her at the end of the day. They would curl up together on his bed for half an hour after he got home from work and he would feel the tension of the day drain from his body. Then he would kiss her and she would start on dinner while he kept her company in the kitchen, reminding him of all the good times he had sitting in the kitchen with his Ma in Chicago during his childhood._

He pulls himself out of his memories and looks at her reproachfully. “I never hit you, Jess. Tell Winnie down at the precinct that you want to press charges.” 

“We don’t need to get the police involved,” she says firmly. “He didn’t mean it. It was my fault; I was trying to get a rise out of him. I should have stayed out of his way. I knew he was stressed out about work."

She looks away from him. “Can you drive me home, Julius?” He notices her trembling hands. “I don’t think I’m okay to drive.”

He sighs and takes her home because he always does what she wants. 

And he knows it’s not his place any more, but he stays outside her house all night in his car, just in case she needs him. 


	8. Gone Girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julius has a bad feeling that he just can't shake.

After the fight, whenever Sam shows up at the office again, he is always on his best behavior.

Julius notices that Sam never apologizes to him about the fight though, never apologizes for hurting Jess, so it irks him that Sam keeps hanging around the office. But Sam is always civil and polite to him, just like he had always been in the past ever since Jess first introduced them to each other, so Julius has to take it. 

He keeps getting a bad feeling in his gut about Sam, even though nothing happens again and Jess seems happy, from the outside at least. He found it hard to control his temper around Sam and would have to leave the room whenever he was around.

\---

He starts chain-smoking to deal with the stress. 

He is outside smoking a cigarette with his hands in his pockets, leaning against the back wall of the building, when he hears the back entrance doors open and Jess walks out. He watches her approach him. 

She plucks the cigarette from his lips. She crosses her arms in front of her and takes a drag before she says, “I know that look, Julius. You’re about to do something stupid. And I’m telling you now: _Don’t._ ” 

She puts the cigarette back in his mouth and he takes a drag, blowing smoke out from the corner of his mouth, observing her. 

They have one of their nonverbal arguments, looking hard at each other, having a staring contest, a battle of wills. Julius looks away first. 

He nods. 

She walks away from him and back into the office building. 

He watches her go.

\---

A few weeks later when Julius arrives at the office, he notices that Jess isn’t there yet. 

_Odd._ She is usually the first one there. She likes to arrive early to change the water in all the flowers that she put around the office, make the first pot of coffee for the day, and write cheerful personal notes on her bright orange post-its to stick on everyone’s desks. She says she likes to know everyone in the office has a good start to their day. 

_‘Maybe she’s sick,’_ he thinks to himself. Jess rarely gets sick but when she does, it takes her out of commission for a few days. He thinks about calling her at home but he really doesn’t want to talk to Sam if he picks up. He knows that if he hears Sam's voice on the other end of the line, he’s going to pick a fight with him and that would upset Jess. He also knows cold medicine always makes Jess loopy so he wouldn’t be speaking to the coherent version of her anyway, even if she did pick up or Sam handed the phone over to her. He thinks back to that time when they were first dating when she got really sick. He gave her cold medicine and put her to bed but she kept getting up because she thought she was Judy Garland and needed to go on stage. She kept calling him ‘dollface.’ _“I like ya, dollface,” she had said, touching his nose with her index finger._ The memory makes him smile. 

\---

She doesn’t show up for an entire week.

Julius can feel the anxiety crawling under his skin at her absence but he thinks he is just overreacting. 

He finds it hard to concentrate on reading the case files. He keeps losing his place and having to re-read the same page over and over again. The words keep swimming before his eyes.

He rubs his three-year chip between his thumb and index finger, feeling that insatiable thirst. _God, he wants a drink. What he wouldn't give for an ice-cold beer. Or even a disgusting room-temperature beer that is all warm and flat from being left out. Anything to feel that golden thrum in his blood, to forget his life for a few hours, quiet these damn voices in his head._ But he knows even one sip will just send him back to the Dark Place he spent so long crawling out of, so he looks at his chip and talks himself down.

He smokes ten unhappy cigarettes and thinks about her. 

\---

The next Monday Schmidt shows him the report that just went across his desk that morning. 

He sees a photo of Jess on the file with the word MISSING stamped on it in bold red letters.

His blood runs cold. His mouth is suddenly desert dry but he manages to choke out, “What do you mean she’s missing?”

“No one has heard from her in over a week, Julius. When Mike went over to her house, no one answered the door. Her car was still there but no one was home.”

He’s suddenly irrationally angry. “Why didn’t someone say something when she didn’t call in sick to work?”

“Sam called in for her.”

 _Sam._ “Well, where is he? Where’s Sam?”

“He’s missing too.”

He can feel himself start to hyperventilate, the beginnings of a panic attack. _He killed her. I let him kill her._

He can feel tentacles of anxiety crawl up his spine and squeeze his lungs. He can't breathe. The room gets all echo-y. Schmidt is saying something to him but his brain isn't following. His heart is being ripped out from his chest.

Schmidt touches his shoulder and looks at him in concern. “Are you going to be okay, Julius? Do you need to talk to somebody?”

Julius realizes that he hasn’t said anything in over five minutes. He has just been sitting at his desk and staring blankly out into the office focusing on his breathing. _In and out, nice and easy._ Just like they taught him in rehab when he used to get panic attacks reliving the war. He shakes his head at Schmidt and falls into work mode, pushing all the panic and anxiety down into a cancerous ball in the pit of his stomach. “I’m okay, Schmidt. Tell me what the plan is.”

“Someone still needs to talk to her family.” Schmidt pauses. “You don’t have to do this, Julius. You can sit this one out. Another agent will take it. I just thought you should know.”

“It’s my case, Schmidt,” he says firmly. His voice leaves no room for argument.

\---

Julius calls Jess’s dad Bob and tells him the awful news. He has to sit through the heart-wrenching sobs that Bob gives on the other end of the line, losing his only daughter, his only child. He closes his eyes and takes it. Penance for everything he didn’t do.

Bob flies in to LA from Portland. Jess was really close with her father since he raised her by himself as a single dad after her mother passed away following a car accident. He had never liked Julius but Jess had always been there to run interference and butter him up so they had come to an uneasy mutual respect for one another during Julius’s marriage to Jess. He never called Julius by his first name though. It was always ‘kid’ or ‘Pepperwood’ or later, ‘that drunk deadbeat.’

When Julius meets him in the PI office, he finds a broken man wringing his hat in his hands. “Julius, please find my little girl,” Bob chokes out tearfully. The first time he has ever called Julius by his first name. 

Julius grips Bob’s hand tightly. Bob squeezes his hand back like it is a lifeline.

“I promise, Bob. As long as it takes, I promise I’ll find her and bring her home.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pepperwood and Night sharing a cigarette was the first image I had of what their relationship was supposed to be like when I started writing this AU. I think sharing a cigarette with someone is a really intimate thing so it shows how comfortable they are with each other even though they got divorced. 
> 
> That intimacy is a key factor of their relationship, that and them always being able to communicate nonverbally because they are so in sync with each other. Pepperwood hates when people talk *at* him because he's an introvert; that's why he had such a problem with Jessica Night initially. But after he let her in and she learned how to read him, she just *got* him, got what he needed from her. That's why it was so devastating to her when he shut her out after he got back from the Zombie Wars.
> 
> The Pepperwood/Night relationship is a lot different from Nick Miller/Jessica Day because Pepperwood always knew who he was. He doesn't have the same type of self-esteem issues that Nick has, even though Pepperwood still thinks he isn't good enough for her. Once he let Jessica Night in, he was already "all in" without hesitation. Pepperwood doesn't let people in easily, but he never lets them go either. He's not only the guy that always shows up, he's the guy that sticks by you forever.


	9. Investigation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Agents search for clues to Sam and Jess's whereabouts.

They get a warrant to search Sam and Jess’s house. 

Julius has never been inside here. It felt strange to see Jess’s whole separate life away from him. He didn’t belong here; it felt invasive and voyeuristic. 

There were hints of Jess in the pops of color everywhere but it felt different than the apartment that she and Julius used to share together. Everything was a little too perfect and orderly, not homey and lived-in. More Dr. Sam than Jess. Something out of a magazine of what you imagine a doctor’s house would be like with his doting wife waiting at home for him. Clinical. A place you invite people to in order to impress them, but you can never fully relax in. The idea of home without ever being a home.

The inside of the house is unremarkable. The usual paraphernalia of daily living: dishes in the sink, books on the coffee table, mail neatly stacked by the front door. A to-do list written in Jess’s neat script attached to the fridge by a magnet. _Pick up milk, pick up the dry cleaning, remember to pick up tickets to the opera, remember to take the car in for its yearly inspection._ Things he would have done for her in their past life together, but which Sam was supposed to do now. He was supposed to take care of her. He was supposed to be better for her than Julius was.

All the photos of Sam and Jess on their walls, a timeline of their marriage together. Him and her on their wedding day. Him and her on their honeymoon. At Christmas surrounded by their families. At the beach. At the opera. At a doctors’ social. Weren’t they happy? They sure looked happy in all these photos. Sunny and smiling. But Julius knew photos were deceptive. You never knew what really went on behind closed doors. Photos just edit everything into what you wished you could see, what you wished your life looked like.

\---

Looking into the closet of the bedroom she and Dr. Sam shared together. His and her things sitting next to each other the way her and Julius’s things used to. Déjà vu seeing her neat rows of colorful dresses. Everything color-coordinated just like he remembers. He runs his hand through the fabric, remembering their past life together. 

A memory box is buried in the far back of the closet. He opens it up and comes face to face with the evidence of that entire past life they spent together. That green bracelet, ticket stubs of movies they went to, postcards from trips they took, a strip of photobooth pictures from one of their dates. She was never one to throw things away. Something glints in the corner. _Her wedding ring._ He takes his ring out from his jacket pocket. He always kept it with him. 

The memories come flooding back to him. _Holding her hand as they picked her ring out together. (Way out of his price range but she was worth it.) Her walking down the aisle towards him in her white wedding dress, falling in love with her all over again. Feeling that warmth in his veins at being able to call her his wife for the first time._

Remembering his wedding vows. _I just want you, Jess…you and me for the rest of our lives._

He pocketed her ring next to his. 

\---

Going through the kitchen cupboards just to be thorough, even though he didn’t expect to find anything there. 

Julius could never cook worth a damn and used to eat greasy takeout food every night before he met her, but she always insisted on making him at least one home-cooked meal a day once they started dating. It was one of their daily rituals once they were married. He would sit in the kitchen and keep her company, watching her work her magic, loving him through food. 

Spices were all lined up in neat rows on the shelves of the pantry. For some reason, there was a whole row of spice bottles filled with cayenne pepper. Julius knew Jess was allergic though. Maybe it was for Sam, but all of them were full with unopened seals. That detail bugged him. Something felt off about it. 

He picked one of them up. It felt heavier than it was supposed to be. He heard liquid sloshing around inside.

He broke the seal and opened it. The smell hit him instantly. That sickly sweet stench burned into his memory. Of death. Of evil. That cotton-candy pink liquid. The zombie serum. 

_Sam was the mole._ He was connected to the serum production.

He turned to walk out and inform Mike about his findings but then he hesitated. It was no longer a simple missing persons case; this was going to go national. But that would risk tipping Sam off when the news reports were playing on every single news station, printed in every single newspaper. Sam wanted these bottles back, Julius was sure of it. The serum hadn’t been detected on any agent blotter in over three years, not since the Zombie Wars ended. Sam had to have created them himself from scratch. This was just a storage location. That meant he was still hanging around somewhere in town, lying low and biding his time until this all blew over and this missing persons case became a cold case so he could come back and collect them.

He capped the open serum bottle. He took all the bottles and placed them in plastic evidence bags before putting them in his jacket pockets and nonchalantly leaving Sam and Jess’s home.

\---

The hospital was flooded with agents. The doctors and nurses tried their best to ignore them and perform their regular duties taking care of their patients. Julius felt bad for getting in their way. Whatever Sam did wasn’t their fault.

The hospital staff adored Sam and were heartbroken to hear he was missing. 

The last time they saw him was on a Friday. An ordinary working day. Sam clocked in at 9AM like usual. Some tough cases on the cancer ward that day talking to grieving families. A surgery dewebbing some kid’s toes. Removing the cast off the arm of another kid who broke it falling out of a treehouse. The regular rotation of checkups involving scrapped knees and writing prescriptions for cold medicine. Sam clocked out at 5PM and hadn’t been seen since. 

\---

It was a large hospital. There were a lot of stairs. It was easy to get lost in the maze of similar-looking hallways. It looked larger from the outside than it actually was inside. Julius felt claustrophobic at times trying to navigate the narrow corridors. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary though.

Julius peered into one of the hospital’s lab rooms and noticed that the equipment count was off, but the staff said there had been an issue with employee thefts. "Someone with a drug problem," the staff shrugged. "It happens."

The agents left the hospital and returned to the PI firm. Julius was frustrated by the lack of clues. Sam was a smart guy and knew how to clean up after himself. 

\---

Julius knows how these things go. In 90% of these cases, more than 48 hours and a missing persons case usually turns into a recovery case. But he has to believe Jess is still alive because if she isn’t, he can’t keep getting up every morning to face the endless torrent of tomorrows and tomorrows for the rest of his life without her. 

Sam is still alive somewhere out there and so is she.


	10. Rogue Agent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julius pieces together the clues regarding Sam's whereabouts.

Julius is sitting at his desk trying to piece together the few clues he has about Sam and Jess’s case.

He has the spice bottles full of zombie serum tucked under the false bottom of his desk drawer. 

They had to still be in town because both his and Jess’s cars were still sitting in their driveway and there were no reported sightings of them elsewhere. No credit card transactions for rental cars. No last-minute plane tickets. No new bank transactions at all.

The last place Sam was seen was at the hospital.

He looked at the hospital map on his desk that he had grabbed when he was trying to navigate the confusing hallways. _It’s larger from the outside than the inside._

He sits bolt upright at his desk. He knows where Sam is.

\---

Julius is trying to be clandestine as he sneaks into the PI firm’s arsenal closet. He straps himself up with guns and ammo. He can’t take too much though or someone will notice the missing stock. Just the normal amount for a field job. He can’t take a bulletproof vest either because it’s easier to count those and someone will notice it’s missing if the local SWAT team stops by the office to gear up. He just has to pray he doesn’t get shot and hope that’s enough. Putting his faith in the cosmic protection of the universe.

\---

He’s almost to the back entrance of the office building when he hears Schmidt behind him. 

“Where are you going, Julius?” Schmidt asks suspiciously. 

He turns around to face Schmidt and goes for casual. “Just going home.” They are the only two people in the hallway. 

Schmidt narrows his eyes at him. He knows Julius never goes home when they’re breaking a big case; he always sleeps at the office. He points to his loaded gun holster. “With your gun?” He approaches Julius and lifts up his pants leg to reveal another loaded holster. “A full arsenal, I see,” Schmidt says dryly.

Julius tries to keep his face neutral but Schmidt has known him for over 10 years. He knows what Julius’s guilty face looks like. They just stare at each other for five minutes. Then Schmidt’s eyes widen in realization. “You know where Sam is.” 

“No I don’t,” Julius denies too quickly. 

“Yeah, you do,” Schmidt insists. “You’re going after him.” 

Schmidt grabs Julius by the lapels of his trenchcoat. “Don’t do this, Julius. Wait for the team. We’ll let Mike know and then we can get all the agents on it to take Sam down.”

Julius pushes Schmidt off him. “There’s no time. It’ll be too late. We’re going to let him get away.”

“Follow standard operating procedure, Julius. It’s there for a reason. Yeah, I look the other way when you bend the rules on the minor cases, but you can’t go rogue on something this big. You’re not thinking clearly. You’re going to get yourself killed.” 

Julius looks at Schmidt with pleading eyes. “It’s Jess, Schmidt. She’s there. I can feel it. It’s down to him and me. If I come in with a full SWAT team, he’ll know and he’ll get away. Or worse. He’ll hurt her to get to me.”

“I can’t let you do this, Julius,” Schmidt says firmly. “I can’t let you jeopardize yourself or any of our other agents trying to be the hero. I have to tell Mike about this.” Schmidt turns his back to Julius to walk down the hallway. 

_‘I’m sorry, Schmidt,’_ Julius says in his head. He takes out a tranquilizer gun from his coat pocket, aims it at his friend, and pulls the trigger. 

Schmidt looks down at his arm where the dart went in. He pulls the dart out and turns around to look at Julius still holding the tranquilizer gun. “You shot me,” he says in disbelief. His face is heartbroken right before he slumps to the ground.

Julius drags Schmidt’s limp body into a nearby janitor’s closet to be discovered tomorrow. 

He leaves quietly through the back entrance of the building. 


	11. Gut Instinct

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julius follows his gut instinct to locate Sam.

Julius is standing in the hospital parking lot looking up at the building.

The hospital wasn’t actually larger from the outside than the inside. They had renovated it and sealed off parts of the building so you couldn’t access them directly. If you could gain access to the old parts of the hospital, you could stay lost for days and no one would know. Sam had been right there the entire time when the agents were searching through the building. Hiding in plain sight.

The sun is starting to set as the work day draws to a close. Julius counts that as a good sign. The hospital is likely to be at its emptiest right before the day shift changes to the night shift and new staff members start drifting into the hospital. The luck of the universe is at his back.

\---

Julius enters the hospital through a back entrance near the laundry room. He takes a flight of back stairs to Sam’s office. It is located in a semi-hidden alcove at the end of a long hallway. Julius takes out his lockpick and unlocks the door. He enters the office and closes the door quietly behind him. The light from the small window in the office is fading fast. Julius takes out his flashlight and aims it low to the ground to avoid arousing suspicion from hospital staff or anyone looking up at the windows of the building from the outside.

Agents had already combed through Sam’s office earlier and had only found the usual doctor’s paperwork. Cards and letters from patients litter the walls in a mishmash collage of colorful construction paper and text written in the large, uneven scrawl of children. Everything in the office is neat and tidy as if expecting Dr. Sam’s return at any time for his next rotation. 

Julius starts tapping the walls but they sound firm. No give.

He gets down on his hands and knees on the tile floor and starts feeling around for any loose pieces. Nothing.

Julius sits down on the floor and runs his hands through his hair in frustration. He was so sure it would be here. He is almost 99.9% sure Sam is hiding in the hospital, but maybe his gut feeling about Sam’s office was wrong.

He looks over at the closed door. There is a bench seat near the door for patients to sit on while they talk to Dr. Sam. It rests on top of a colorful throw rug.

Julius gets up and moves the bench seat. He lifts up the throw rug. There is a hinged door underneath. Julius gives a wry smile. _It’s always the last place you look._

He opens the door and finds a ladder leading down into a dark abyss.

Julius sits down on the ground with his legs dangling into the abyss. He finds his footing on the ladder. He descends the ladder single-handed holding his flashlight. Once he is far enough down the ladder, he reaches up to close the hinged door. Once the door is closed most of the way, there is just enough room to pull the throw rug and bench seat back into place.

Julius closes his eyes and takes a deep breath on the ladder. 

_Hang on, Jess. I’m coming for you. I’m coming to get you back._


	12. Confrontation

As Julius descends the ladder, he focuses on just putting his feet and hands in the right places so he doesn’t slip. He doesn’t let his mind wander to what he will find down below. He tries not to aim his flashlight too far down in case it tips off Sam or any other minions he may have with him below.

Julius’s feet finally find empty air instead of the next rung. The end of the ladder. He jumps off the ladder and his hand lets go of the rung, but there is an unexpectedly large drop at the end. His feet make an unsteady landing and he ends up on his back, knocking the wind out of him. _Ouch._ He picks himself up and aims his flashlight around trying to get his bearings.

He is dismayed to find a maze of hallways in front of him, just like the hospital above. 

But then he smells it. The faint sickly stench of the zombie serum. Sam is definitely somewhere close by. 

Julius starts following the smell. It leads him down the maze of corridors until he sees a faint light at the end of a hallway. He turns off his flashlight and pockets it. He unholsters his gun and approaches the light cautiously.

The light is coming from a lab room. Julius steps inside and looks around. He can see the missing hospital lab equipment in the room. There is a mess of beakers and other lab glassware on the counters filled with different colored liquids. There is a station set up with microscopes and different glass slides of cell samples spread out on a table. There is a small cadaver lying with its chest cut open on a dissection table. A chalkboard in the far corner is filled with a messy scrawl of calculations and ideas. Papers with copious handwritten notes are spread haphazardly on every open lab counter and table.

He turns his head to the right and sees her.

_Jess._

She has a blindfold on and her mouth is taped shut. Her hands and feet are bound by rope. She has a large purple bruise on the side of her right temple like someone had hit her in the head with a heavy blunt object.

He looks quickly around the lab for Sam, but it is otherwise empty. He holsters his gun and rushes over to her. He takes off her blindfold and pulls the tape off her mouth. 

Her eyes open wide in surprise when she sees him. Then they fill with fear. “Julius,” she rasps out, her voice creaky from disuse. “You have to get out of here. Sam’s coming back any minute. He’ll kill you.”

“I’m not leaving without you, Jess,” he says firmly. He reaches down to untie her hands and feet. He helps her stand up.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Julius,” Sam says from behind him.

Julius turns around to face Sam. Sam has a gun aimed at him. He’s wearing his stained hospital lab coat and two weeks’ worth of stubble. His eyes are full of dark menace, grim and determined. The expression on his face makes him look unhinged like the Unabomber.

“Hands where I can see them,” Sam commands. Julius puts his hands up.

“Over to the side.” Sam gestures with his gun. Julius does as he says.

Sam comes over and pats him down for weapons. He tosses all his weapons and ammo across the room, out of reach. He smiles when he reaches into Julius’s trenchcoat and pulls out the serum bottles sealed in the plastic evidence bags. “Saved me the trip.”

Sam backs up with his gun still aimed at Julius. He places the bags with the serum bottles on the lab counter.

“Who’s with you?” Sam asks. 

“Nobody. It’s just me,” Julius replies. 

“Well, that was pretty dumb, Julius.” Sam seems almost disappointed.

“I’m the one you wanted, right? That’s why you took Jess.”

“You flatter yourself,” Sam drawls. “You don’t know the larger picture.”

“Enlighten me,” Julius shoots back.

Sam looked into the middle distance lost in thought. “It didn’t have anything to do with you or her, not in the beginning. I just couldn’t stand another day treating some sniveling brat’s scraped knee. I was a doctor, but I wasn’t doing anything important. I wasn’t a _real_ doctor curing anything or helping humanity.”

Sam’s eyes focused and he looked directly at Julius. “You gave me the idea actually. Jess told me all about how you fought in the Zombie Wars. It fascinated me. I read everything I could get my hands on about it. All those people you had to kill because you couldn’t turn them back, couldn’t cure them. It was like I had finally found my true calling in life. Curing the Zombie Virus. You never caught the original producers so it was going to make a comeback eventually, whether we were prepared or not, and no one else was working on a cure.” 

“I bought samples of the zombie serum off the black market. It was disturbingly easy. I figured out how to replicate it, but I couldn’t find the cure without bringing the Zombie Virus back in a live host.” Sam gestured over to the small cadaver on the table. “I had to take some bodies from the cancer ward and bring them back."

Julius felt sick. “They were children, Sam,” he choked out.

“They were already dead,” Sam says with a shrug, looking away from Julius. 

“You were playing God; it wasn’t your choice to make. You’re a doctor, Sam. What happened to the Hippocratic Oath you took? ‘Do no harm’?”

“I figure it was an even trade-off since they were saving all the future people that would have gotten the virus. They had already died once of natural causes; this way their lives wouldn’t be wasted. They died again helping humanity.”

“What if they had gotten out, Sam? They would have infected others, started the whole epidemic you were trying to prevent.”

“I was careful,” Sam said defensively. “I knew what I was doing.”

Sam looks over to the chalkboard. “I need more time,” he says faintly to himself. 

“It’s over, Sam,” Julius says. “Turn yourself in. You know it’s wrong and you're in over your head. You haven’t killed anybody yet. You just made a mistake. Don’t make another one.”

Sam gets angry. “This wouldn’t be a mistake if Jess would have just kept her damn mouth shut. I was close! _So close._ All my hard work down the drain. I could have been famous. Textbook famous. Cure for cancer famous. But she was going to tell you everything. I couldn’t risk that. I needed more time to finish and now that time is up and I’m still not done. No cure for zombies and I get to spend the rest of my life in prison.”

“Turn yourself in and I’ll get you a plea deal. Maybe 30 years, out in 15 with good behavior.”

“Yeah and be a felon for the rest of my life. I won’t even be able to practice medicine anymore.”

“There’s life after, Sam…There’s still life after.”

Sam shakes his head. “There’s nothing out here for me to come back to anyway.” He looks over at Jess. “You still chose him. After everything I tried to give you, you still chose him.”

Julius interjects, “I lost her, Sam. She still married you.”

“Nah, I was always her second choice. You were always still around; I couldn’t get rid of you. And I tried damn hard too. I never really had her. You know we were supposed to move to New York when you got your first year chip? I was patient; I made sure you weren’t going to backslide so she didn’t have to worry about you. She told me she couldn’t leave because her job was too important to her to just up and quit, but I knew the real reason why. It was because she couldn’t leave you behind. I saw it in her eyes.” 

Sam looks down at the ground and sets his jaw before clicking off the safety on his gun. 

“But if I can’t have her, you sure as hell can’t.” 

Sam points the gun at Jess and pulls the trigger. 

Julius feels the world moving in slow motion as he dives to push her out of the way. He takes the bullet right to the chest and his body crumples to the ground.


	13. Body And Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It wasn't his time. He couldn't give his life over yet because it still belonged to her.

Julius drifts in and out of consciousness. He thinks he hears Jess calling his name and crying, sobbing over him, but he thinks he’s still dreaming. 

_He can’t open his eyes. Why can’t he open his eyes? He isn’t done getting Jess out yet. Sam is right there; he’ll hurt her._ He thinks about getting up but his body won’t cooperate. He realizes that he can’t even feel his body, can’t feel his arms and legs. The only thing that exists is his mind, floating on a pitch-black ocean. 

He feels cold.

\---

He finds himself sitting on the edge of a river. _The River Styx._ He keeps hearing that Blue Oyster Cult song in his head. _Don’t fear the reaper…_

Storm clouds gather overhead. He looks to either side of him and Jess isn’t there so he thinks that’s a good thing. He’s all by himself sitting on a rock in the long overgrown grass at the edge of the river. The grass is yellowed and dead on his side of the river, but it’s all lush and green on the other side. 

He’s not cold anymore and he feels calm. He doesn’t think he’s supposed to cross over yet. It’s just nice and peaceful here, even with the storm clouds overhead threatening rain. He’s waiting for something.

He peers into the river. The water is crystal clear, not polluted and murky like he expected it to be. He thinks he sees Jess at the bottom of the river looking up at him and beckoning him in. She is wearing that red polka dot bikini from their Mexican honeymoon. She cuts through the water like an ethereal mermaid. He feels compelled to walk into the river even though it should feel crazy because he’s still wearing all his clothes. Once he is almost completely submerged in the deep river, he takes a deep breath and dives in. He’s swimming to her and this time he doesn’t run out of air.

\---

He opens his eyes and then closes them again. It’s really bright.

He feels a hand on his face. _Jess._ She saw him blink. 

“Julius,” she breathes out. “You finally woke up.”

“Jess,” he chokes out, “You’re alive. You’re okay.” He opens his eyes again and focuses on her face. “What happened?” 

“Mike came in with the SWAT team and they took down Sam. Schmidt put a GPS tracker in your coat, but it took a while for them to find the signal underground. They swarmed in right after Sam shot you.” 

She starts crying. “You saved me, Julius. You were legally dead for two minutes before they brought you back. A few more inches and he would have gotten your heart.” 

He takes her hand from his face and presses it to his heart. “I always had more luck than I knew what to do with,” he jokes weakly. 

She looks at him and she can see the man she fell in love with behind his eyes. “Tell me you still love me, Julius.” 

His eyes are soft with love for her. “I never stopped loving you, Jess. I just got lost for a while and I couldn’t see you anymore. I should have let you help me. I’m sorry I left you all alone.” 

She’s crying harder now and through her tears she says, “Marry me, Julius.” 

A grin breaks out on his face and he says, “What took you so long?” 

He pulls her in to kiss him, making up for all those times he never got to during the time they were apart. 

Against his lips he hears her whisper, “I just want you, Julius…you and me for the rest of our lives.” 

It’s his turn to cry. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title references the Tony Bennett & Amy Winehouse duet, [ Body and Soul ](https://youtu.be/_OFMkCeP6ok)
> 
> _My heart is sad and lonely,_  
>  _For you I sigh, for you, dear, only_  
>  _Why haven't you seen it_  
>  _I'm all for you, body and soul_  
>  […]
> 
> _You know I'm yours just for the taking_  
>  _I'd gladly surrender, myself to you, body and soul_
> 
> PS - I totally screwed up and used Nick instead of Julius at the end there. That would have been a totally different ending. :p Didn't catch it when I read through on editing; think I fixed all those name issues now. Let me know if you see anything else.


	14. Epilogue: Courthouse Two-Step

They get married again on a Friday. No fanfare, just going down to the local registrar’s office. 

She wears the outfit he fell in love with her in that first day and he wears his tan suit with a red tie. 

When they leave the building, she stands on her tiptoes and gives him a peck on the cheek. He can feel the tingle of her lips on his face and in his heart for the rest of his life. 


End file.
